Santa Fe
Sunday, February 7, 2010 at 01:51PM 
We've been living in Santa Fe for three weeks now. Here's a picture of our Great Dane Rufus checking out the snow outside our home. My work at Outside Magazine mostly consists of fact-checking. In his 2009 New Yorker article Checkpoints, John McPhee details the duties of a fact-checker. Most of your work is on the phone, learning the mathematics of international time zones. It's interesting stuff.
Former New Yorker and current New York Times Magazine head honcho fact-checker Sarah Harrison Smith lays it all out in The Fact Checker's Bible. I've got to admit this was not a book I'd envisioned myself curling up with next to a fire. But it's interesting stuff. Smith delineates how the U.S. press is privileged with a Constitutional Right to free press, as opposed to most other countries. But with that privilege comes responsibility to ensure periodicals get it right. For one thing, it lessens the reputation of a magazine to print retractions for errors-in-print. Who's going to believe you if you keep getting it wrong? For another thing, you don't want to publish misinformation about someone—particularly if it involves sexual or legal indiscretions—without having done your homework. In the legal world, that's called libel. And it's not something with which the magazine wants to deal.
Wells Tower has a new article on Venice in Outside's April 2010 issue. I've been reading his short story collection, (just out in paperback,) Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. It's deserving of the praise. His writing reminds me of Tom Franklin's 2000 story collection Poachers. These guys are visceral and darkly funny.
Speaking of which, Catherine and I spent a couple hours last night in the dark confines of the Santa Fe Brewery listening to my old friend and Lost Highways recording artist Hayes Carll. He played a great set to a packed house. He was my last interview for the college newspaper, eight years ago. I caught him as Billy Joe Shaver's opening act at Austin's Cactus Cafe. Which I hear is now being closed in UT's budget cuts. Couldn't they borrow some money from Mack Brown to keep this musical institution going? Go to Save the Cactus Cafe and let your voice be heard.